Railroad played big part in life for past residents of Fall River

It’s difficult for us denizens of 2013 to realize what railroads meant in 1872, when the only other means of transport were horses or your own two feet. The Old Colony Railroad, which ran a little more than 131 miles of track from Boston down to Newport, R.I., wasn’t a big railroad, not by ...

It’s difficult for us denizens of 2013 to realize what railroads meant in 1872, when the only other means of transport were horses or your own two feet.

The Old Colony Railroad, which ran a little more than 131 miles of track from Boston down to Newport, R.I., wasn’t a big railroad, not by the standards of, say, the Union Pacific. It was strictly a local line, though it carried passengers who were going on to other railroad lines that would take them to other places.

One of the wonders of the 19th and early 20th centuries was that every town, even towns with populations of 200 in the middle of South Dakota, had access to the railroad. The train might not always stop in those places but it would if there was a passenger who wanted to get off; you could get on a train in Taunton and get off in St. Joseph, Mo. — though the trip would take a while and you’d have to change trains a few times.

To do all that meant railroads maintained a tremendous amount of track, machinery and employees.

Along with its 131.33 miles of track, the Old Colony had 45 locomotives, six snow plows, 95 passenger cars and more than 1,000 freight cars. It hauled coal, hay, people, vegetables, pigs, cattle, raw materials and finished goods.

In 1872, according to the report of the Massachusetts Railroad Commissioners, the Old Colony carried more than 3.5 million local passengers and 185,500 passengers who were using the line to get to another railroad and a farther destination. The line’s passenger trains racked up 740,661 total miles, or about 5,600 trips, over the 131.33 miles of track the company owned.

There were 42 telegraph offices located on Old Colony property and 142 places where the trains crossed a road or path.

Of those 142 crossings, 122 of them had no flagmen, gates, signals or any other mechanism to warn people a train was about to pass.

In 1872, the Old Colony built two bridges in Mattapan and one in East Bridgewater.

Nineteenth century railroading was dangerous. In 1872, 12 people who were neither riding nor working for the railroad were killed by trains on the Old Colony Line.

On Oct. 2, 1872, William Callahan was killed by one of the company’s trains in Boston. Callahan was drunk, the reports said.

Brothers William and John F. Doherty ran away from school in Fall River and headed north, walking the tracks. The boys made it to Quincy, where they were struck and killed by an Old Colony freight train on Nov. 11, 1872.

John Roach wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t running away from school. He was working in the Ferry Street train yard in Fall River on Nov. 30 of that year. The report says only that he was “fatally injured by a passing train.”

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In Dighton, on Jan. 26, a team of horses and four men nearly made it across the tracks before the train arrived at the crossing but one of the men was “considerably injured.”

On Aug. 3, 1872, Old Colony employee B.C. Hubbard was coupling cars in Fall River. He lost his footing, fell between the moving cars and was crushed. Coupling cars is the act of hooking rail cars together with metal pins.